(no subject)
Five minutes in the life of your muse.
One
The printer spits out sixty-five pages of court opinion-only the legal system could produce a sixty-five page "no"-and Alan gathers the still-warm stack of paper in his hands and carries it to his office. Abigail Alliance v. von Eschenbach was decided over a year ago; it has mattered to him for all of ten hours.
He takes a seat behind his desk, trains the lamp on the bundle of words. Silence drapes over him like a coat, thick and heavy.
“Abigail Alliance” is (as often happens) a truncated version of the petitioning organization’s full name: Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs. The founder’s daughter died of cancer at twenty-one and he affixed her name to a non-profit, put her picture on the front page of a homely little website.
Alan never bought into the Kübler-Ross model. They’re a convenient fiction, those five neat stages, designed to bestow a soothing sense of continuity on the aggrieved. To him, grief has always been a series of poses struck, a collection of awful grimaces made in the mirror.
He flips past the cover page and begins to read.
Two
“All I’m saying is it’s not a legal argument you’re propounding.” Alan tips his head back, widens his mouth to admit a slice of pizza that droops like the face of somebody who’s received some very bad news.
They’re crammed into a booth, eating off paper plates translucent with grease. From the corner of his eye, Alan can see a squat man in a flour-dusted t-shirt shoveling pie after pie out of the oven.
“Are we in a courtroom?” She knocks her knee against his, her smile mocking but not entirely devoid of affection. She’s called him a dopey drunk-in accordance with her theory that every man, when intoxicated, assumes the personality of one of the seven dwarves-and she’s not wrong. “Besides, you don’t win a jury’s heart with legal reasoning.”
“I don’t want to win hearts; I want to win cases.”
“Boils down to the same thing.” She peels a splotch of pepperoni from her pizza and regards it with almost scientific interest before popping it in her mouth. “I thought you were an idealist.”
“Where is it written that an idealist has to believe in people? Much less”-he gives a tidy little smirk; bit by bit, it unravels into a smile-“the intelligence of the average juror. I believe in-I cling to the ideal that, as a lawyer, I won’t ever be called upon to sway a jury with a sob story about my client’s dead dog.”
“You have sauce on your chin,” she says. “C’mere.”
Three
He sits on the living room’s gargantuan cream-colored sofa, studying the way his fingernails fit together. He slides one thumbnail-the dead, white part of the nail, the part that looks like a smile-underneath the other and pushes, thumbs straining against each other, unmoving, like a pair of evenly matched wrestlers. When they begin to sting he moves on to his index fingers.
“Alan. Look at me, Alan.”
He folds his hands in his lap and looks up.
His mother is talking, talking, talking, her voice smooth as a skipping stone. He watches her mouth, her lips, the hint of pale pink tongue crouched behind pristine teeth. He finds the lines on her face-the shallow, wobbly crescents on either side of her mouth, the deeper grooves below her eyelids, the crooked crease in the bridge of her nose. He watches the hollows in her cheeks and the light tangled in her hair.
He watches her eyes. He doesn’t have words to hang on the emotions-not yet-but the thrill of recognition comes just the same, like an impatient tap to the shoulder.
“Alan, are you listening?”
“Sorry,” he mumbles, automatically.
Four
Alan should be asleep, cocooned in cool, clean sheets and dreaming of Marshall’s opinion in McCulloch, the words soaring above the Capitol dome like untethered party balloons: “We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding.” He should be seated at the desk in the corner, poring over the mounds of research Jerry and Katie have amassed, a cup of coffee growing cold beside him. He should be standing before a mirror in tomorrow’s suit, reciting the fine phrases he’s readied for the occasion.
He’s playing with his tie on the bed.
He sets the ingenious little mechanism-it was described to him as simple, a stopwatch fused with, say, the siren mounted atop a toy fire engine-for ten seconds and waits, counting along in his head. Right on schedule, the tie blushes bright red, continues blinking until Alan thumbs the switch into the “off” position.
There’s a rattling at the door, an approving click from the electronic lock. It’ll be Denny, smelling of alcohol with perhaps a hint of opposing counsel’s perfume lurking beneath.
“I thought you were…” One of Denny’s hands loops through the air even as the other slaps his keycard down on the dresser. His face offers no insight into the outcome of the conversation downstairs-it might’ve gone well, it might’ve gone poorly. It might already be forgotten.
“That was the idea,” Alan agrees. “I got…a little overwhelmed.”
With a grunt Denny plants himself on the bed. The mattress contracts under their shared weight.
“You want a drink?”
“No,” Alan says, threading the tie through his fingers.
They don’t touch and the promises they make aren’t spoken.
Five
He never fails to fall silent at the sight of the Supreme Court building.
One
The printer spits out sixty-five pages of court opinion-only the legal system could produce a sixty-five page "no"-and Alan gathers the still-warm stack of paper in his hands and carries it to his office. Abigail Alliance v. von Eschenbach was decided over a year ago; it has mattered to him for all of ten hours.
He takes a seat behind his desk, trains the lamp on the bundle of words. Silence drapes over him like a coat, thick and heavy.
“Abigail Alliance” is (as often happens) a truncated version of the petitioning organization’s full name: Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs. The founder’s daughter died of cancer at twenty-one and he affixed her name to a non-profit, put her picture on the front page of a homely little website.
Alan never bought into the Kübler-Ross model. They’re a convenient fiction, those five neat stages, designed to bestow a soothing sense of continuity on the aggrieved. To him, grief has always been a series of poses struck, a collection of awful grimaces made in the mirror.
He flips past the cover page and begins to read.
Two
“All I’m saying is it’s not a legal argument you’re propounding.” Alan tips his head back, widens his mouth to admit a slice of pizza that droops like the face of somebody who’s received some very bad news.
They’re crammed into a booth, eating off paper plates translucent with grease. From the corner of his eye, Alan can see a squat man in a flour-dusted t-shirt shoveling pie after pie out of the oven.
“Are we in a courtroom?” She knocks her knee against his, her smile mocking but not entirely devoid of affection. She’s called him a dopey drunk-in accordance with her theory that every man, when intoxicated, assumes the personality of one of the seven dwarves-and she’s not wrong. “Besides, you don’t win a jury’s heart with legal reasoning.”
“I don’t want to win hearts; I want to win cases.”
“Boils down to the same thing.” She peels a splotch of pepperoni from her pizza and regards it with almost scientific interest before popping it in her mouth. “I thought you were an idealist.”
“Where is it written that an idealist has to believe in people? Much less”-he gives a tidy little smirk; bit by bit, it unravels into a smile-“the intelligence of the average juror. I believe in-I cling to the ideal that, as a lawyer, I won’t ever be called upon to sway a jury with a sob story about my client’s dead dog.”
“You have sauce on your chin,” she says. “C’mere.”
Three
He sits on the living room’s gargantuan cream-colored sofa, studying the way his fingernails fit together. He slides one thumbnail-the dead, white part of the nail, the part that looks like a smile-underneath the other and pushes, thumbs straining against each other, unmoving, like a pair of evenly matched wrestlers. When they begin to sting he moves on to his index fingers.
“Alan. Look at me, Alan.”
He folds his hands in his lap and looks up.
His mother is talking, talking, talking, her voice smooth as a skipping stone. He watches her mouth, her lips, the hint of pale pink tongue crouched behind pristine teeth. He finds the lines on her face-the shallow, wobbly crescents on either side of her mouth, the deeper grooves below her eyelids, the crooked crease in the bridge of her nose. He watches the hollows in her cheeks and the light tangled in her hair.
He watches her eyes. He doesn’t have words to hang on the emotions-not yet-but the thrill of recognition comes just the same, like an impatient tap to the shoulder.
“Alan, are you listening?”
“Sorry,” he mumbles, automatically.
Four
Alan should be asleep, cocooned in cool, clean sheets and dreaming of Marshall’s opinion in McCulloch, the words soaring above the Capitol dome like untethered party balloons: “We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding.” He should be seated at the desk in the corner, poring over the mounds of research Jerry and Katie have amassed, a cup of coffee growing cold beside him. He should be standing before a mirror in tomorrow’s suit, reciting the fine phrases he’s readied for the occasion.
He’s playing with his tie on the bed.
He sets the ingenious little mechanism-it was described to him as simple, a stopwatch fused with, say, the siren mounted atop a toy fire engine-for ten seconds and waits, counting along in his head. Right on schedule, the tie blushes bright red, continues blinking until Alan thumbs the switch into the “off” position.
There’s a rattling at the door, an approving click from the electronic lock. It’ll be Denny, smelling of alcohol with perhaps a hint of opposing counsel’s perfume lurking beneath.
“I thought you were…” One of Denny’s hands loops through the air even as the other slaps his keycard down on the dresser. His face offers no insight into the outcome of the conversation downstairs-it might’ve gone well, it might’ve gone poorly. It might already be forgotten.
“That was the idea,” Alan agrees. “I got…a little overwhelmed.”
With a grunt Denny plants himself on the bed. The mattress contracts under their shared weight.
“You want a drink?”
“No,” Alan says, threading the tie through his fingers.
They don’t touch and the promises they make aren’t spoken.
Five
He never fails to fall silent at the sight of the Supreme Court building.